상품화된 전쟁

Abstract

The years from 1937 to 1945 have been perceived as a “valley of darkness” in modern Japanese history. During this period, when the notions of consumption and leisure were harshly criticized under the National Mobilization Law, it was the department stores that must have sustained the most challenges. However, interestingly enough, the financial net profits of department stores steadily increased every year from 1937 until 1940. If department stores, known as cathedrals of consumption, are to be incompatible with a system of total war that enforces a life of austerity and thrift, the increase in department store sales until 1940 is inexplicable or must be interpreted as a product of the failure of the state-directed mobilization campaign for total war. However, the pursuit of personal desire and pleasure became not antithetical to, but rather constitutive of, the service and sacrifice for the wartime state through department stores. While people’s everyday lives were strictly regulated and controlled by the state for the goals of total war, department stores provided the moral justification for personal consumption and leisure, allowing people to pursue their desires and pleasures without contradicting their obligation towards the war effort. Department stores sustained and even prospered in their business by appropriating the state-directed mobilization campaign for total war rather than contradicting it. During the war, particularly in the years from 1937 until 1940, daily life on the home front posed not as a rupture but as a continuation of prewar modern life, taking on the form of “wartime modernity.” This article explores the ways in which department stores adopted various visual practices to commodify the war as an object of consumption and leisure.